At Pulse 2010, my friend Cathy and her team put together an awesome little video demonstration of their new real time asset location solution for the Healthcare industry. The solution uses Maximo software to monitor and manage patients, staff and physical assets in a hospital. Check it out:

Big Blue said on Tuesday that it will license its Tivoli Netcool/Ominibus and Network Manager technology for Junos Space. The pact was announced during IBM's Pulse 2010 conference in Las Vegas and Juniper's Financial Analyst meeting in San Francisco.

Our partners are one of the most valued assets IBM has, both to the company itself and more importantly to our customers. Our partners carry the value of our integrated service management solutions to our customers and I am pleased that Juniper is now a part of our valued partner ecosystem.

If I had a penny for every time the word “Pulse” has been said around the IBM offices over the past month…I’d have a lot of copper!*

Seriously. “Pulse fever” is in full effect. It’s happening right now. As I write this, our customers, our valued business partners and many of my colleagues have converged on Las Vegas and are having a service management jam fest that makes Woodstock look like band practice in some dude’s basement on a Wednesday night.

So, one of the things that I have been working on is compiling the new and exciting announcements that are happening in and around the event.

We can start with the post Tiffany “Lois Lane” Winman's wrote on the Pulse conference community blog about the Keynote featuring Tivoli General Manager Al Zollar and former Vice President Al Gore.

The following are some of our announcement highlights as well as some helpful links. Please feel free to post comments on this blog.

Integrated Service ManagementThis is something that the entire IBM team has been working on for quite some time. Kathleen Holm discussed this yesterday and the only thing that I would add is that it is an exciting time to be working in service management. Companies such as IBM are helping customers expand their capabilities outside of the confines of the data center and assisting them all of their intelligent assets. Integrated Service Management is much like the “web 2.0” of service management (but without the funny t-shirts), and IBM continues to be in a leadership position in this space.

IntellidenAs you may have read last week, the IBM Corporation was proud to announce the acquisition of Intelliden, a leading provider of intelligent network automation software. Pulse is a great way to welcome our new IBM brothers and sisters to be a part of our Integrated Service Management solution, and looking at what they have achieved so far with Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) I know that they are going to be a valuable contribution to our customers and to the IBM company.

When In Austin Or La Gaude, Visit Our Solution Experience LabsIf you are a customer and want to see our Smart Grid solution, there are two labs that you can go to; one here in Austin, TX and the other in La Gaude, France. The Smart Grid solution is an end-to-end Energy and Utilities lab environment with a focus on Advanced Meter Management to help customers address security challenges.

Smarter Buildings With Our Partners, Johnson ControlsAbove, I discussed the press releases we did around smarter buildings and facilities with some of our customers. In addition to those, Todd Watson has a great post about what IBM is doing with Johnson Controls to create smarter buildings. The long and short of it is that IBM is working with Johnson Controls energy efficiency building technology to provide advanced business analytics to help our customers address inefficiencies (press release).

Ricoh Intelligent Device ManagementTodd also discussed our announcement with Ricoh. It's “…an advanced device and printing management system which infuses office devices with real-time tracking and monitoring to help firms significantly reduce their print-related costs, improve service and cut back on carbon footprints.” (press release)

OPALThe Open Process Automation Library (OPAL) are some great “ready to deploy” solution integrations and references that extend our software’s “out of the box” deployments. The interface to the website is smooth, easy to search and best of all there are now 1,800 entries. If you are a customer, you gotta check this site out.

Tivoli Security Information & Event Management: Version 2.0 provides customers with a single integrated product for insider threat, audit and compliance management, and reporting. New features can be found in the announcement letter.

Tivoli Role Modeling/Management Open Beta ProgramSince we’re talking about security, I should also mention that we currently have an open beta program for two exciting products; IBM Tivoli Security Role Modeling Assistant and the IBM Tivoli Security Role Management Assistant. Details on the solution and the beta are on the IBM website.

In his keynote address yesterday, Al Zollar talked about how customers are leveraging Integrated Service Management. Capital Region of Denmark in Copenhagen, is in the process of leveraging Integrated Service Management to track missing assets, improve maintenance schedules and get their company back on track.

Capital Region of Denmark is a conglomerate of hospitals with data distributed across three different storage tiers and four sites, with an online disk capacity of 500 Terabytes and backup and archive data exceeding 1.5 Petabytes.

They have solved their storage complexity issues with Integrated Service Management and are managing their entire storage infrastructure with only four people.

He also talked about how the U.S. Air Force is leveraging Integrated Service Management. The U.S. Air Force defense and intelligence network manages the operations of nine major commands, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active military personnel around the world. They are leveraging Integrated Service Management solutions to design and deliver a cloud infrastructure with unprecedented levels of security and resiliency.

It's not just a vision for the future--it's happening now. Integrated Service Management can help your company get past the complexity and risk you deal with on a daily basis.

In his keynote today, Al Zollar described the opportunities and challenges presented by a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world. The proliferation of smart devices presents new opportunities to deliver new innovative services- services that wouldn’t have been dreamed of just 10 years ago. These new smart devices also add new levels of complexity that is growing due to the number of new devices and connections added each day, and skyrocketing numbers of security threats and compliance regulations.

Al Zollar outlined examples of increased complexity in a number of industries i.e. an electric company dealing with smarter meters, regular old school meters, transmission insulators, servers, and turbine buckets; a conglomerate of hospitals in Copenhagen managing data distributed across three different storage tiers and four sites with online disk capacity of 500 Terabytes and backup and archive data exceeding 1.5 Petabytes; and the U.S. Air Force managing the operations of nine major commands, nearly 100 bases and 700,000 active military personnel around the world.

He then posed the questions, How do you overcome all of this complexity? How can you possibly see everything? How can you manage and secure everything? How can you increase speed while reducing cost?

The answer—Integrated Service Management that provides the software, best practices and expertise needed to manage infrastructure, people and processes—across the service delivery chain—in the data center, across design and delivery, and tailored for specific industry requirements.

He then went on to explain how Integrated Service Management contains service architectures tailored by industry like the smart grid for energy, or electronic medical record systems for healthcare.

It has lifecycle management bridging workflow across line of business, enterprise architecture, development and testing, and IT and business operations to speed delivery of products and services and ensure continual improvement.

Integrated Service Management also includes service dashboards that allow all audiences—from executives and business operations to IT managers—to see the service and gain insight into service health.

He closed by someone needs to be the thought leader in your organization...and that someone is you! Integrated Service Management can help you achieve that goal.

There are many great reasons to attend Pulse 2010- you can see real-world demonstrations of the newest service management solutions, you can hear about strategies and product roadmaps that can help you chart your roadmap for success, and you can get free-certifications and hands-on instruction in on-site labs. These are all great reasons to attend Pulse 2010, but I would like to focus one that often gets overlooked--networking with people not like you.

Pulse gives you the opportunity to attend tracks tailored to your specific area of focus and network with people doing work like you do. While there is a great deal of value in networking and sharing ideas with people whose roles are similar to yours, there may be even more value in talking with people who don’t do what you do.

What would happen if CEOs, service providers, IT professionals, plant managers, facilities managers, VPs of Operations, security administrators, and storage managers talked with each other? What kinds of solutions and ideas would emerge?

For true innovative thinking to occur, reframing challenges and understanding different points of view is key. While it’s easier to stay in your comfort zone and talk with people who speak your language, the opportunity to talk with people from other industries or from your industry but with roles different than yours may be one of the one of the best ways to gain new insights, reframe the challenges you are facing, and think outside the box.

Pulse 2010 gives you the opportunity to do just that. It offers you the chance to network with industry leaders and a broad audience of users and partners who may have different takes on service management—ones that can help you solve existing problems more efficiently, develop new services, or find new ways to accelerate growth and gain competitive edge.